PTSD changed you for a time, but you can change again!

The list of times I faced traumatic events is long but I can tell you that this report on Salon is not the total truth. Yes, the trauma stays with you just as every other good event in your life. Everything that happens become part of you at this moment in time. Your past tags along.

Yet when you think about the fact that you kept changing up to and including the "big one" setting off PTSD, you can keep changing. You can keep healing, finding peace and live a better quality of life. PTSD changed you for a time, but you can change again! It doesn't have to win.

“There is no cure for trauma. Once it enters the body, it stays there forever”
Survivors say the day of their trauma marks the end of a chapter in their lives.
The IED attack in Iraq was mine
Salon.com
DAVID J. MORRIS
FEB 1, 2015

We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world. Trauma is the savagery of the universe made manifest within us, and it destroys not only the integrity of consciousness, the myth of self-mastery, and the experience of time but also our ability to live peacefully with others, almost as if it were a virus, a pathogen content to do nothing besides replicate itself in the world, over and over, until only it remains.

Trauma is the glimpse of truth that tells us a lie: the lie that love is impossible, that peace is an illusion. Therapy and medication can ease the pain but neither can suck the venom from the blood, make the survivor unsee the darkness and unknow the secret that lies beneath the surface of life. Despite the quixotic claims of modern neuroscience, there is no cure for trauma.

Once it enters the body, it stays there forever, initiating a complex chemical chain of events that changes not only the physiology of the victims but also the physiology of their offspring. One cannot, as war correspondent Michael Herr testifies in “Dispatches,” simply “run the film backwards out of consciousness.” Trauma is our special legacy as sentient beings, creatures burdened with the knowledge of our own impermanence; our symbolic experience with it is one of the things that separates us from the animal kingdom. As long as we exist, the universe will be scheming to wipe us out. The best we can do is work to contain the pain, draw a line around it, name it, domesticate it, and try to transform what lies on the other side of the line into a kind of knowledge, a knowledge of the mechanics of loss that might be put to use for future generations.
read more here